Learning a foreign language in quarantine

If you even remotely resemble me, your life has probably undergone a significant metamorphosis recently, turning at least 90 degrees.

You’ve probably given up your daily office visits, you’ve cut back on meetings with work colleagues and contact with your family has become less frequent. You may also have found that meeting friends in local pubs or having a barbecue in the garden together has become just a fond memory.

Unexpectedly, you have gained a lot of free time. You may have already used some of it to catch up on various things around the house. You may have cleared out the attic, tidied up the tools in the garage…. Your car is sparkling clean, your garden has been carefully dug up and the walls in your flat have regained their freshness. Perhaps you’ve even taken up refinishing your furniture or discovered a passion for preparing gourmet dishes?

STOP!!!

All these activities are undoubtedly beneficial and have certainly required your commitment for a long time. But have you thought about another activity that, apart from dispelling boredom, can bring additional benefits and enrich your life?

Yes, we are talking about learning a foreign language.

Now is the perfect time to start, resume or continue your studies. Why? There are many favourable circumstances:

1. you now have the time. Much more time than before, when you were involved not only in your professional life, but also in your family and social life. When the time-consuming commitments fell away (those hours-long commutes!), you suddenly found that you could even get a little bored.

2. you have unlimited access to materials, apps and the best teachers. Quarantine time and the need to move to a more online life has encouraged many teachers and schools that previously did not specialise in online lessons to try new tools and opportunities. There is even a joke related to the current situation: Question: who has contributed most to the digitalisation of your company? Was it the CEO, or the Board of Directors, or the FCO? Answer: COVID.

3 The economic situation has also forced many schools and teachers to reduce their hourly rates. Schools have also put together lesson packages where an hour of tuition with a teacher is as attractive as it has been in a long time. Check out the packages on prolang.co.uk to find out for yourself.

4. teachers are more flexible when it comes to lesson times. When it is not necessary to travel to the client, often in traffic jams and to a distant end of town, they are willing to teach at a much higher range of hours than if they had to travel to the client. You can therefore tailor the hours that suit you both best. New technology encourages even more creativity, engagement, and the ability to tailor classes to your needs. Need to practice a particular grammatical construction more? Click, and a new exercise appears on the screen. The teacher can literally find an extra task for you in a second, consolidating

These are just a few positive aspects of the current situation.

There is another important aspect, particularly relevant in this day and age. In an age of quarantine, restrictions on human contact, fears about health and sometimes about work, it is extremely important to take care of the state of one’s psyche. The Lancet, a recognised medical journal, conducted a study on the effects occurring in people in quarantine and found that various mood disorders, sleep problems, anxiety and restlessness and even post-traumatic stress disorder appear among a significant percentage. Boredom and frustration resulting from the situation are very common.

Therefore, it is important to prevent these effects from occurring as far as possible. One important recommendation you can read about on the quarantine advice pages is to create some structure for your day and set yourself daily/weekly goals to achieve. If we add to this a commitment in the form of online lessons with a tutor, which can satisfy our need for social contact, we will also manage to take care of our health at least to some extent and cope with this unusual time.

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